The Rules of Engagement

Thanks to all for a great All-Hands Meeting last week. To those who were there, you got to see me embarrass myself (and my kids) a little bit. That may be motivation enough for those of you not able to attend to watch the video recording that we’ll be sharing on Teams. Besides the embarrassing photos, I also imparted some of the reasons that we need to change and the level of uncertainty we all, including myself, have around the conditions of that change. There are not always easy answers to questions like, “What is the priority?”

Yes, that’s me. With one of the original Apple Macintosh computers.

We have engagement campaigns coming up soon where we have opportunities to make significant connections across the university and contributions to the university’s operations and strategic direction.

2FA for AllMulti-factor authentication will now be known as two factor authentication (2FA) to avoid confusion with other education-related terms that can be shortened to MFA. 2FA is what we will use when we roll out the service to the university in the coming months for key online services that we support, such as Office 365. Securing the university’s data is a priority that ITS and 2FA plays an important part in. Speaking of Office 365…

Office 365While we have provided and supported the Office 365 suite for some time now, it’s a service offering that we can better utilize. Many of our customers aren’t aware of the suite’s breadth and power, and therefore underutilized. Additionally, there are many areas in which we can save resources by leveraging Microsoft enterprise software that we already have. I’m sure many of you have ideas for how we can further leverage O365 to support teaching, learning, research, and operations.

Website HostingI believe deeply in providing modern web publishing tools to the University community. I feel the idea of digital expression is a form of scholarship that should be explored and supported. To this end, we are working to deliver a more robust and sophisticated web service to support faculty, staff, and student digital expression and website development. The number of websites that we host is certainly not decreasing and the role that they play in how our customers are communicating their thoughts, ideas, research, classwork, portfolios, etc. is only increasing. We will offer a fast, intuitive, and on-brand way for faculty, staff, and students to create websites. This will require us to think through some obstacles and it will have to be rolled out in phases. But in the end, it will provide a much-needed service to the university and free up some of our resources so that we can use them in more productive ways. This is a “stay tuned” for more information update …

To make the projects above successful, we will develop better relationships with the IT professionals across the University. It will be these staff who help us create many of the connections we need to make locally as trusted advisors to faculty, staff, and students.

All Hands. Photo Credit, Ken Papai

As all of the important work above is getting done, the daily work to keep the lights on is just as critical. For instance, ITS maintains over 228,000 networked devices and over 4,400 wifi access points that allow our customers to access nearly all of our services. And last month, the Service Desk resolved nearly 10,000 tickets on behalf of our customers. Very impressive!

So, thank you for all of the work you
have done and are doing. I am so encouraged by what I am seeing. I hope to see
you all again soon online or around the offices.

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My name is Cole W. Camplese and I serve as the Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. This is my space on the Northeastern web to share thoughts, updates, and insights.